EU entity reports $106M+ lost from exchange accounts
Security & Exploits ·
An EU entity is suspected of losing more than $106 million from multiple centralized exchange accounts, with the illicit actor now laundering the funds through privacy coins and cross-chain bridges.
The suspected theft occurred yesterday, November 1, when stolen funds were withdrawn from the accounts as USDC and USDT, according to a report detailing the incident first flagged by ZachXBT. Over the following 24 hours, the illicit actor aggressively swapped the stolen USDC for ETH before moving the funds through instant exchange services including WellWallet and Kyrrex.
From there, the actor converted a portion of the funds into Monero via Wagyu, a privacy-coin exchange route, while also bridging assets across multiple blockchains. This pattern of layering — stablecoin withdrawal, conversion to a major asset like ETH, routing through instant exchanges, and final conversion to a privacy coin — is a common method used to obscure the trail of stolen funds before they can be traced or frozen.
The incident has been corroborated by multiple reports describing the same scale of loss and laundering pattern, with four distinct sources covering the cluster as of this writing. A list of theft-linked addresses has circulated publicly, intended to help exchanges and chain-analysis firms flag and potentially freeze related deposits before further funds are converted.
What remains unresolved is the identity of the EU entity affected, the specific centralized exchanges from which the funds were withdrawn, and whether law enforcement or the exchanges involved have moved to freeze any of the implicated addresses. It is also not yet known how much of the $106 million has already been successfully converted to Monero and rendered untraceable versus how much remains in traceable form on-chain. Further details on the entity's identity and any recovery efforts are expected as the investigation continues.